Hey there /r/askhistorians.
Some background on this rather specific question: My significant other (A communications Ph.D. student with an interest in history) is working on some historical research at the moment. She's working on a piece looking at how the daily newspapers in New York City covered the topic of death, especially on the front pages, in 1904.
So far, it's been some really interesting stuff. For example: one paper covers the death of a homeless German immigrant found frozen in an ally in January as a novelty due to the fact he had mysterious injuries to the back of his head and a curious note in his pocket, while another paper hardly mentions it as yet another homeless man dying in the cold.
She's running into an issue though: She cannot find hardly any information on who the publishers or editors were for the New-York Tribune or The Sun in 1904. She asked me to help, so I scoured through my pile of media history books, but I cannot find anything. Because I know of your power here on this sub, I figured I'd try my luck asking y'all.
There's loads of information about the New Journalism era from 1870-1900, and there's tons of info on the death of the media baron properties in the 1920s and 1930s (When Greeley, Day, Hearst, and Pulitzer were all either dead or no longer in the publishing business).
But as hard as I try, I cannot find anything about the ownership and daily operations of those papers: The Sun and The New-York Tribune, for 1904.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, and thanks ahead of time!
Looks like the editor-proprietor of the Tribune in 1904 was Whitelaw Reid, who acquired the paper from Greeley in 1872 — in circumstances that I don't fully understand. The proprietor of the Sun in this period appears to have been William M. Laffan, who bought the paper in 1900 (apparently with backing from J.P. Morgan) from the estate of its previous owner.
Hope that helps. I think a couple of those links might be behind the NYT's paywall — if so, sorry!
(PS. I feel your pain on this one — I wrote my undergrad dissertation about war correspondents in Spain in the 1930s, and had to spend hours googling and draw several complicated diagrams to keep straight in my mind the ownership of the dozens of newspapers whose coverage I was reading, and their various political/commercial connections.)